


Of Punishing Light (the hell in their mouths remix)

by TrisB



Category: Battlestar Galactica 2003
Genre: F/M, Orgasm Delay/Denial, Power Play, Remix, Rough Sex, Season/Series 01-02 Hiatus, Shower Sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-06-21
Updated: 2009-06-21
Packaged: 2017-10-09 20:14:06
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,791
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/91157
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TrisB/pseuds/TrisB
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Think you can handle me now?"</p>
            </blockquote>





	Of Punishing Light (the hell in their mouths remix)

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Burning Driftwood](https://archiveofourown.org/external_works/998) by Claira. 



> Title from [Imagine That](http://www.danah.org/ani/Reckoning/ImagineThat.html) by Ani DiFranco and [The Fruits of Your Garden](http://www.box.net/shared/fx4rlo2qrl) by Mirah, which is apparently her only song with no lyrics online but is nonetheless this fic's ~theme song~. Endless thanks to Rawles, Carrie, and Tropie for listening to me whine, reading my drafts, and pointing out my errors periodically for the past eight months goddamn.
> 
> Dedicated to the BSG fandom class of 2005.

  
The coffee in the ready room is stale. There is no coffee anywhere in the fleet that isn't stale, because rainforests are hard to come by in space, but this tastes like irradiated tree bark imported from post-Cylon Sagittaron and left on a hotplate for several hours. Kara sips at it puckishly, determined to finish her cup all the more for how much she hates it. Normally she prefers a downer to a stimulant any day; caffeine makes her feel jumpy and hot-skinned. Today's the perfect day for shitty coffee, maybe. She can hardly get any jumpier.

Lee's been dogging her for some time, up on her junk and beating the regs into the ground like he gets a bonus for every time he addresses Kara pointedly as "Lieutenant." Maybe he does and that's the old man's new method of motivating the troops. Tom Zarek has been pirating a wireless signal to preach discontent about the meaninglessness of economy, the Roslin government, the Baltar-Amorak scandal, and the disenfranchisement of the working class. It's just like the Adamas to respond to that kind of thing with ever more structure; the military has always been the Commander's one-size-fits all response to chaos. Maybe Lee gets off on it like his dad does. Maybe he wants her to dog him back. It's impossible to tell with him; his overactive mind is too burdened by obscure schemes of revenge and redemption to ever be fully understood. Maybe he's really just that much of an orthodox prick.

She used to dog _him_, berate him to stop being her friend and behave like a damn CAG. Sometimes he slays her anger with soft requests and sometimes he meets her there in the tempest, and now that she's keeping her trap shut, she is a collection of raw nerves for him to inflame. In some moods this, too, would be reason enough for him to try to irritate her. She knows Lee — she would never put that past him.

Whatever Lee's governing philosophy for his practiced push and pull, Kara's teeth are set on one edge and she is nearly off another. She spent all day by his orders doing inexplicable repairwork on Raptors — like Cally or the Chief or one of the newbie ECOs can't do it — and now she just wants to cuddle up for a little while in the crawlspace of her Raider, humming and listening for a response, but she can't. She can't because when they woke up Lee gave her a look that made her shiver, because two hours later he was curt and incourteous, and because last rotation he rescheduled CAP just so they wouldn't interact. Her own frequency feels scrambled by Lee's imposed whiplash, and today she can't hope to home in on the strange signals of the Raider. She's barely at home with herself. Kara discards the empty cup and, filthy with engine grease and the mysterious biochemical sheen that coats the inside of the Raider, heads back to the barrack.

She takes a long way.

"Nothing but the rain," she's said to Commander Adama every morning since she shipped out with Galactica, keeping the koans Zak used to collect alive. It doesn't mean much in its original sense anymore. She literally cannot remember the last time she heard rain; water is a Cylon attack point or a planetside mission or the greywater swishing through the pipes. There are worse things to miss than weather and changing skies, and as she closes in on the rack, she savors the memory; if the walk back to the hatch takes a little longer than it needs to because of that, well. Grab your gun and bring the cat in.

⁂

  
On the other side of the rack Lee's off duty and has been for a while, perhaps working on the fugue that's now allowing him to stare at her in unnerving silence. Stuck on a Battlestar there are no books to read or vacations to look forward to or phone calls to make; all you have to think about are the walls that separate you from the cold black sky and those few companions inside. Before the apocalypse it was an escape; after, a sentence. Kara can't help but feel the quieter periods are increasingly drawn and defined by the lines between herself and Lee — on Galactica "day" never meant anything but time between attacks, but lately time is best measured by his moods. When she looks up, he's grinning lazily: another sun on the rise.

"You fixed it?"

"Of course."

"Starbuck wins again?" He rises from his bunk to hover intimately close to her as she shucks off her shoes.

"Yeah," she mutters, focused on her socks. Not the shallow breaths by her neck. "The Raptor put up a courageous fight, but I took it down in the end."

"Glad to know you can still kick something's ass."

"Ooh—" She snaps her head to smirk angrily in his too-close face. Her caked-over skin tingles with irritation as her hands pass over it to strip off her tanks, stained with engine grease. "Someone's had a bad day, haven't they?"

"You know you smell revolting, right?"

"Oh, frak you." She coughs out an unamused laugh, and faces him naked and furious for reasons she can't even separate out at this point, as though the muddled message of the Cylon Raider were now coming straight from her flushing sternum. His gaze rakes over her body, not surreptitious enough for her to miss, and he tries to turn it into a joke.

"You offering?"

Unbelievable. Kara wonders why she's even still standing here. "You couldn't handle me, Lee."

The light seems to change in his eyes.

⁂

  
Her bare feet make soft slapping noises on the tile leading up to the showers.

When Kara first frakked Zak it was in the cockpit of a broken flight simulator. More accurately, it was a flight simulator he had just managed to break, and where any other student would get chewed out and put on probation for that level of ineptitude, his rueful, panicked laughter made her kiss him. And pull away, shocked at herself — and then be pulled back forward, through the barrier of ethics and judgment and irreversibly disastrous decisions, towards his laughter and his death and his family, all of them her own endings. She chose both of their destructions on that day, and if Lee knew what he were doing when he follows her past the barrier of unspoken rules and meaningless regs and their own frakked-up history, then he would know he's setting a new course for a new disaster.

Maybe he does.

She feels the first gust against her when Lee passes through the hot vapor boundary of the showers and repeats her last words to her. "I can't handle you?" His tone is mocking.

And gods, if this week has been a question he's just now putting words to, she'd like an answer. She thinks she might like this all behind her. "Well, can you?" Kara replies before she can think better of it.

He answers with a kiss and a firm and sudden grip that destroys her balance and would send her sliding towards the drain if he weren't controlling her body so completely. His muscles in this misty light are indistinct except where touch gives them away; droplets are spiking and separating out his hair, and his expression is of a profound and solemn arrogance Kara can't identify. There's something shaming about how altogether compelling his mouth is leaning into hers, how urgently sensation ripples up her torso at the touch of his hand; awful to so instantly lose her resentment to this unanticipated abandon. But he's placed his right hand now at the warmth below her clit and she can't help but press her face against him, working hungry kisses into the ridge of his clavicle — can't interpret this connection in any other way than mutually ravenous, it's _Lee_, Lee, Lee, Lee — she cries his name into the wet skin of his upper pecs - his fingers come to a sudden stop.

She hasn't.

The shower water is spiking, scalding against her backside, and Lee is breathing raggedly into her ear, his cock hard against her hip, but these are all distractions. She hasn't come and still he drags it out, so that climaxing is more like a painful climb. He's not here to make nice, but to make a point. She frakking hates him. Kara inhales, twists, tries to pull back from his handcrafted verge, but his _fingers_ are _there_, and in defeat she hears herself gasping, "Please." A god bestowing his petty favor, he lets her have what she never, never until now, would have asked for.

After her legs have unhooked shakily from around his thigh and hand, she finds they don't work so well anymore, and she clutches at the tap to keep herself anchored when she leans breathless aginst the shower wall. Lee's eyes are flickering around her face, impossibly dirty under wet lashes; he still wears that expression of profound danger, the warrior in epic battle. Kara's teeth snatch at her flushed lip rather than kiss him again, which she desperately wants to do only slightly less than she wants to die instead. He says her name; lays the tips of two fingers, damp not from the shower, on her cheek.

Her prickling skin broils underneath his deliberate touch. "I think I _can_ handle you," he says and lets go — she didn't realize his left hand had held her shoulder, had been keeping her up. Kara's legs buckle slowly beneath her and she slides down to the tiled floor, which is slick with still-running water and the last remnants of her abandoned soap. Lee is gone. Kara breathes, alone in a column of rising steam.

⁂

  
She tells herself to be relieved it finally happened. This tension existed between them since it held hands like a comrade, untouchable, with Zak; now the both of them can be laid to rest.

She tells herself this is not like Starbuck's plaque hanging over Apollo's in the flight school ranks; there is no competition anymore, and neither will there be a hall of fame.

But the most useful thing she's found to tell herself in the aftermath is that when Lee walked out of the showers — so intent to give her his reckoning — he left with blue balls. It's childish but she loves it. It's funny as hell.

Funny's not enough, though, not even enough to make her give him a word or cast him a glance over the next two days, which drag on indefinably without his moodswings to frak her sense of time up. He doesn't try to force it. He just watches her whenever he can, again, and it's almost like they've skipped back to just before everything happened, when he was baffling and enraging her in equal parts — but nothing, nothing is the same.

⁂

  
Lee posts the CAP schedule and without saying anything she arranges with Kat to switch shifts. Kat doesn't want to, that much is obvious; Kara is long past the point that throwing her weight around like this would even cause a twinge of remorse. She has other things on her mind.

Like what to do when Lee finally catches up with her. His footsteps have been echoing hers as she jogs through empty corridors, trying to elude him, but he's a hunter, same as she is; he caused this silence and apparently he won't be satisfied if he can't end it, too.

Frak him. She waits in the doorway of Baltar's abandoned lab and yanks him in when he passes by. This isn't his game anymore if she can control it. He is backing down, hoping for small talk and reconciliation. Another time, she might have let it happen his way, but not today. "Payback's a bitch, Captain," she says, and she means: with interest.

She can have him, steal from him the terms he set. She can back him into a corner and explain to him wordlessly that they are whatever _she_ wants them to be, that she has enough unshakable debts to ghosts that she won't quiver under the thumb of somebody so ineffectually alive.

"Take off your shirt."

"Kara—"

"Take off your frakking shirt and your shorts," she orders, frakking orders, and puts her hands all over him to stake her claim. He has nothing to do but obey. All of the power that was in his eyes two days ago is gone; now he's sick for her, looking at her with such abject desire she wants to punch him in the face. Instead she shoves him against the wall and when his hands grasp at her tanks she strips them off herself, adamant that he understand he does nothing to her, that she is charting her own course now. That course leads them to the cold lab floor, where she straddles him, her grip almost inadequate to the challenge of his broad shoulders, but she digs her hands in and says, "Think you can handle me now?" She rubs up against him, feeling him get hard as her pelvis rocks. When he lets out a soft cry she gives a snickering huff, lowers herself onto him, and rides.

Lee's head jerks back, apple of his throat jutting out and bobbing as he tries to work inside her, but she sets the rhythm, slower than he wants, leaning over his torso until she finds the perfect position, full and angled just so. "Gods," he pants, "Kara," but he cuts himself off with a strangled sort of noise when she changes speed and shuts her eyes. A hand scrabbles at her ribcage, then down at her hip, erratic; a tiny burst of perfection gives her twitch, and she goes faster still. It's not long before he's ready to come, but he's not going to until she lets him. Then there is a sudden catch well below her belly and she bucks forward, arcing her back and straining her chest as the intensity that has been building takes her entirely and, just below, Lee is swept up in it as well. Her vision suspends and white noise stuffs up her ears, so Kara is only just aware that he cries her name again, thumbing her nipples as the quake in her spine subsides; she catches another tremor, rides it out, and tastes the air. Reality is setting back in, and Lee's head is craned up as far as it goes, tongue reaching for the underside of her breast.

The lick jags Kara out of her haze and she pushes him back down. The metal-plated room is pungent with ambient sweat and the sharp scent of sex; it's a faintly rusty aroma that fights all the other dozens of sensations for her attention. And Lee lies, rebuffed; he just stays there as she gets up and tries to clean off; she can feel him watching as she gathers her scattered clothes and begins to dress.

"Happy now?" Lee says. He's sitting up, elbows draped over his naked knees, and he looks like a kid. Her stomach lurches as she tugs on her tank. _Now we're even_, says his face. Lee loves his systems and concepts like _fair_. He can't conceive of a world where there's no such thing. Kara doesn't know whether to feel jealous or scornful.

"Since when was this about happiness?" she says before leaving him there. There's another one of those ideas Lee always claims to love, one which Kara thinks she might never understand.

⁂

  
The thick field of stars facing the wide window of the observation deck are stunning when she stares at them like this, not just swimming through easy and indifferent in a Viper. There's no atmospheric twinkle, no light pollution out here — the view is a true cross-section of galaxy, made of an unfathomable number of suns. Sated and starving, Kara curls up to watch them as they burn, scorching worlds impossible years away. She's traveled far since, but a star like these used to keep her time.

Footsteps tell her Lee is in the doorway, ready to parlay the game into a new set of rules, ready with soft words of _maybe together_, ready to frak her back or apologize or confess. Whatever his words, she doesn't want to hear them today.

She has to, though, and if she doesn't head it off his voice will break silence; once again, Apollo sheds first light on a new day. His game. She wants that least of all. She doesn't turn around, though; doesn't watch his reflection on the stars in the glass.

Kara speaks.


End file.
